cat named pig

People have been asking for pictures of Elliot’s haircut. While it’s not thaaaat dramatic, it is quite handsome, in my completely unbiased opinion.

Here are a few that I took with my phone when it occurred to me halfway through the appointment that hey! this first-haircut-ever-in-his-life-besides-that-one-awful-time-at-home-with-the-nail-scissors might be something to document! You know, with a photo.

Here he is getting a sucker after the haircut was done:

As soon as we got outside, I tousled it up to get rid of the side part that looked a little too 1950’s salesman for my taste, and it hasn’t been styled again since.

What else is there to say about it? He sat in the chair like a champ, probably because he was watching Elmo. He said “thank you” for the sucker. And ever since the big day, he’s been loving the attention from friends and family who were relieved about the wispy mullet’s demise. (Full disclosure: I still sort of miss the wispy mullet. It was cute. See below for a “before” picture of the full wispy, party-in-the-back-and-on-both-sides glory.)

Are you wondering what’s going on in this picture? He explained that he was playing Duck Duck Grey Duck. With the Fisher Price Little People and two dinosaurs. Because, why not? Incidentally, that was when I decided to home school Siena and never let her leave the house again. This poor little guy needs someone to play with. Someone alive — it’s hard to make a triceratops run around the circle.

And then he lined them all up.

The other night we went to Fat Lorenzo’s for pizza. It was crowded, as always, in the tiny little entrance/waiting area/gelateria, but somehow we lucked into a few chairs. Elliot, however, had no use for the chairs as they interfered with his plans to run around like he was being chased by angry bees. After about thirty seconds of that — enough time to bump every single person in the area at least twice, and by “area” I could mean either the space we were in or a certain “area” of the anatomy and the sentence would be accurate either way — I pulled him onto my lap and whispered that I had a story for him.

He leaned in and miraculously held still while I made up the following cautionary tale, in the tradition of the Brothers Grimm but with a happy ending:

Once upon a time there was a little boy named Elliot. He was at a restaurant with his family and he was acting very wild, running all over and bumping into people. And nobody liked that. Then the door opened and a man came in with a very large backpack. He scooped Elliot up and stuffed him into the backpack, then zipped it shut and took him far, far away. When he unzipped it again, Elliot looked around and said,

“Where are my mama and my daddy and my sister Siena? Please, take me back to them!”

The man said, “I will take you back to them, on one condition. You must not run around in the restaurant ever again. You must go back and sit nicely, and then you must eat your pizza nicely when it comes. Do you promise?”

Elliot promised to be good, so the man brought him back to his mama and daddy and sister, and they all ate a huge pizza and lived happily ever after.

Laugh as you may (yes, this is why I stick to non-fiction in my writing), Elliot loved this story and asked me to repeat it five more times before we were seated. Tonight at dinner, he asked me to tell it again. Siena laughed when she heard it and Matt, well, Matt probably thought it was dumb. (To which I would say, “Yeah? Dumb? It got him to sit still didn’t it? So is my story dumb, or is it dumb like a FOX?” Or something. I haven’t worked it out yet.)

And then. . . Elliot announced that he wanted to tell a story. The following is an approximation of what he told, minus a whole bunch of adorable and hilarious that doesn’t quite translate to the written paragraph:

One upon a time, there was a girl named NANA [this is what he calls Siena]. And she real bad and a big man came and put her in he backpack. And threw her in the GARBAGE. And Nana say, “Where mine mama and daddy and mine little brother EL-LI-OT?” And he taked her out of the garbage and she seed her mama and daddy and her brother El-li-ot and dey all eat pizza.

He totally needs to take over this blog. The GARBAGE twist puts my version of the story to shame.

I feel like I fell asleep in mid-July, woke up long enough to hit “snooze” in early August, blinked, rubbed my eyes, and now it’s almost October. In other words, whoa. Slow down there, Time.

On the other hand, I’m surprised how quickly we’ve settled into our new fall routine — it feels like we’ve been doing the whole elementary school thing for much longer than three weeks. Siena loves kindergarten, which we expected, but she also gets herself ready every morning without any coaxing, hand-wringing or muttered cursing on my part, which no one expected. For the first time in our lives — and for once I am not exaggerating — we seem to be consistently getting out the door on time and on speaking terms with each other. Preschool last year, though only three days a week, was much more challenging in this regard.

So I spend my days alternately shaking my head in bewilderment at how summer can be over already and crossing my fingers that the mornings continue to go this smoothly, that we’re not just experiencing a “honeymoon period” where everything to do with school is great and easy.

Meanwhile, Siena and Elliot continue to grapple with the notion of time in their own ways.

Elliot wakes up every morning (earlier and earlier, I might add, which makes no sense when you consider that the sun is rising later and later) and announces, “I wake up at TEN MINUTES again.” We don’t know whether he means after ten minutes, or that he slept for ten hours, or that he’s been awake for ten minutes already and WHERE’S MY CEE-YAY-YUL? But he is emphatic and consistent enough with this phrase that now we just respond, “Oh, you woke up at ten minutes again, huh? Well, how about some cereal?” and that seems to go over pretty well.

Siena actually has a pretty realistic sense of what time of day things take place, what day of the week it is, and even how long it will be until something happens. Sometimes. Other times, her flair for drama interferes with her ability to comprehend. Or to be more accurate, she chooses drama over comprehension, because the drama is, I don’t know, louder.

For example, the following conversation takes place in some form several times a day:

“Mama, when are we going to [insert any fun thing here -- visit Avery in South Dakota/see Beauty and the Beast the musical/get my driver's license/eat candy, etc.]?”

“Well, today [is Wednesday/is in September/you are five/it's not even dinner time yet] and you’ll do that [next weekend/around Christmas time/when you're sixteen/maybe for dessert], so, you know, not right this second.”

“WHAT?!?! You mean I’m NEVER going to [see Avery EVER AGAIN/see a musical EVER/drive a car EVER in my LIFE/eat candy EVER AGAIN]?!?!? This is TERRIBLE!!!”

“Yes. That’s exactly what I said.”

*Sigh.*

And that’s exactly what I would say, over and over, if I were hanging out in your living room right now. Side note: why does my blog voice sound so Valley Girl sometimes? But, like, seriously, you guys, it’s all just kind of hitting me now. Kindergarten.

Maybe it’s because we had so much going on the week she started school (travel, a wedding, a new city’s public transportation to explore), or maybe it’s because she got sick last week and had to miss two days (no, it was not H1N1, but don’t think I didn’t ask). Or maybe it’s because she just hops on the bus so casually every morning, like she’s been doing it for years.

Whatever the reason, it really just hit me tonight that Siena has started kindergarten. I have a kindergartner.

A kindergartner who carries a backpack,

who gets taller by the minute, who picked out an awesome sparkly Super Girl t-shirt to wear on the first day of school,

who hugged us all tightly at the bus stop that first morning but then today just gave me the quickest of squeezes and a slightly exasperated “Mo-OM!” as I tried to hold on a second longer.

…..

Which, I guess, pretty well sums up this whole experience.

…..

…..

I’m trying to stop holding on so much, I promise. But, you guys, it’s like, totally hard to let go.

…..

For our first anniversary, Matt and I spent the weekend at a bed-and-breakfast outside Madison. The year after that, we flew to Montreal and stayed in a charming hotel with a fabulous restaurant. We don’t do gifts, but every year since Siena was born we’ve gotten a babysitter and gone out to dinner.

Yesterday Matt and I celebrated our eighth wedding anniversary, but I use the term “celebrated” loosely here. “Briefly acknowledged it” might be more accurate, or even “survived it.” Not that the anniversary of our marriage required surviving, but the day itself sort of did.

We spent the weekend in Portland, OR, for my cousin’s wedding. The whole weekend was all kinds of fantastic, from the gorgeous hotel (stay here if you’re visiting Portland and like Mad Men), to the beautiful vineyard wedding, to the free public transportation in downtown Portland. Seriously, riding the street car and light rail made the trip for Elliot. We visited with family and checked out Powell’s Books, which you should also do if you’re in Portland (and have a spare suitcase to fill). We had a blast.

But then we had to get home.

Due to a staggering lapse in judgment and common sense, we had originally booked our flights without bothering to check Siena’s school calendar. You know, the calendar for the elementary school she is attending for the very first time ever, kind of a big deal, major life milestone, etc. Brilliant. So we had tickets to fly out on her first day of kindergarten. This obviously had to be fixed, which turned out to cost approximately the GDP of a small country. We ended up just changing Siena’s and my tickets. This meant Matt and Elliot left a day earlier and got home a day later than Siena and I did, and hooo-boy was that ever a mistake. If I had known what the emotional fallout of that decision would be like, I would have sold my house and all my belongings to avoid the hours of drama from Siena about the unfairness of it all.

She and I got home Monday night and I put her to bed around 8:00. At 11:00 p.m. she was still coming out of her room, alternately sobbing about missing the boys or raging about how they got a longer vacation and it WASN’T FAIR. Which it wasn’t. At that point, I certainly would have preferred still being on vacation to three hours of histrionics at home.

She finally went to sleep and slept later than she ever has in her life. I took her to the bus stop in the morning and then sent Matt a romantic and loving three-word text message to mark our eight years of wedded bliss. Then I went home and cleaned the litter box.

We picked Matt and Elliot up around bedtime, which meant Siena was even more tired and grumpy by the time we got home from the airport. She was thrilled to see Elliot though, and hug-wrestled him for about fifteen minutes before I pulled them apart. She had missed Matt, too, but chose to express it by being angry at him for being gone. They got into a battle of wills over pajamas that you could probably hear at your house. Or in space.

In the midst of all this, the toilet overflowed. (Never buy the extra-thick toilet paper if you have a child — they will not believe that you can use less of it because it’s thicker. No matter how many times you explain it to them.) After mopping up toilet water, I went downstairs to start a load of laundry and saw a centipede the size of a cat skitter across the floor in front of me. I screamed, then cursed when it disappeared into a corner.

“This is the worst anniversary EVER!”

I went upstairs and grumbled to Matt until we decided to watch Mad Men online. Watching shows on the computer is what we do most nights after the kids go to bed. This welcome return to normalcy (and the soothing sound of ice clinking in Don Draper’s cocktail glass) helped dispel my bad mood. Matt, as is usual for him, had never even gotten crabby.

I won’t ever book a trip where we fly separately again. Not just because of Siena’s reaction, but because Matt is my favorite travel companion. I missed squeezing his arm as the plane took off, and I missed his ability to stay completely relaxed while checking in and going through security. (I tend to navigate the airport in a state of HIGH INTENSITY until we get to the gate — then and only then do I chill out.) Mostly, I just missed him. After eight years of marriage, I still like having him around. And not just because he usually cleans the litter box.

That last post wasn’t as great as I wanted it to be, so I think I’ll start over. (Ha. Perfectionist Humor. I crack myself up.) But seriously, the subject is still on my mind as we prepare to send Siena off to kindergarten next week.

Siena has been asking me for stories about when I was her age, and I have a hard time remembering much about kindergarten. I remember walking to school, and getting in the wrong line to walk home* the first day until my best friend Heather spotted me and told the teacher we were supposed to walk together.

I also remember getting in trouble once and having to sit in the Time Out Chair because I got bored during Circle Time and started looking at books on the shelf next to me. (Neither of these stories is really helpful right now, as I attempt to quell Siena’s fears about starting school. I also got the chicken pox ON HALLOWEEN in kindergarten and no, I will not be sharing that little anecdote with her either.)

But one memory that really stands out to me, when I think about those first few years of elementary school, is the day I didn’t have homework in first grade. That’s right, day. I did homework every single night of first grade, except one.

Why? Was my average suburban neighborhood public school that rigorous? No. Was my first grade teacher especially draconian, drilling us relentlessly with letters and numbers and cutting out shapes? Hardly.

I had homework every night of first grade because I was never willing to be done with anything. It was never right; it was never good enough. I colored so slowly and meticulously that by the time the other kids had finished two pages, I still had three-quarters of my first one left. If I cut out a shape and it didn’t look right, I started over on a new one. I asked my teacher for multiple copies of worksheets, because I had written one letter wrong and when I erased it, it looked sloppy.

I actually remember the teacher telling me some of these projects looked fine, she thought they were great just the way they were, and I remember being disappointed by her low standards. I knew they could be better, and I brought them home and worked on them until they were closer to what I thought they should be. Or until my parents made me go to bed.

Then came the glorious day where, for whatever reason, I decided to color a little bit faster even if that meant a little bit sloppier, and I got everything done within the time allotted at school. I got to come home and play until bedtime. You know, like a kid. It was great. But then I remembered the green crayon going slightly outside the shapes of bushes and trees. (Seriously — I still recall exactly what that picture looked like, that Gateway to Slacking Picture that paved the way for every unfinished project I have ever abandoned since then. That picture is probably responsible for the disastrous state my house is in at this very moment.) And when I thought about that horrible sloppy coloring, I felt sick. I had homework every night for the rest of the school year.

I’ve spent the years since then seesawing back and forth between On Time and Good Enough. Things that are Good Enough for my inner panel of judges rarely come without the price of multiple sleepless nights (or I’m still working on them now) and things that are done On Time? Well, I mostly despise the living daylights out of them.

Anyway, I share this lifetime of inner turmoil to demonstrate that I am clearly not the best role model for Siena when it comes to her perfectionist tendencies. I don’t know how to help her balance getting things done with feeling good about her work, as I have clearly not mastered this yet myself. I want her to do well in school, but I want her to enjoy it more than I did. (Except college. I want her to enjoy college less than I did, and I would not be at all upset if she spent every weekend night in the library studying.)

Maybe you have a better handle on this stuff than I do. If so, I want your advice. I have to get this figured out now, before she gets to first grade when the pressure really starts.

…..

*For some reason they didn’t know where I was supposed to go, and when they asked me where I lived, I guessed and pointed in the exact opposite direction of my house**.

**Note to teachers: do not rely on a five-year-old’s sense of direction in such important matters as which way to send them walking home from school by themselves***.

***Note to self: your sense of direction has always sucked. Let’s try and remember this the next time you casually decide to just “take a different route home from Target and see if it’s any faster.” It won’t be, because you’ll get lost and confused and you’ll spend an extra twenty minutes driving around while the kids ask incessantly, “Are we LOST, Mama?!?”

I admit it. I have a problem: I want to do everything right. Not just right, but flawlessly, excellently. I want to reinvent the very concept of whatever it is I’m working on, so people around me will pause, amazed, to think wow, what she does has totally changed everything I ever thought about parenting [or writing an annual report, or whatever the task in question may be]. In other words, I tend to set really small, manageable expectations for myself.

Needless to say, the only outcome I have ever experienced as a result of this sort of thinking involves disappointment. Lots and lots of disappointment. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten better about handling the disappointment — I’ve developed strategies for avoiding it.

Strategy #1: Not Trying. If you’re not trying, it doesn’t matter if you fail to achieve excellence in a particular area. You can simply decide that something (having a clean house for example, not that I’m speaking from experience or anything here) is not Important. Then you don’t have to feel bad about the stacks of unsorted paper that sit so long they need to be dusted before you can actually sort them move them from one corner of your bedroom to another. You don’t have to berate yourself when large tumbleweeds of cat hair drift across the desert living room floor while you check your e-mail.

This strategy works pretty well as long as no one comes over.

Strategy #2: I Don’t Have Enough Time. This is similar to Strategy #1, in that I can employ it to avoid feeling disappointed in myself. If something is not perfect, not the best ever of its kind, it’s not my fault because I only had a tiny bit of time to work on it. It’s not like I tried my hardest and did absolutely everything I could and it still wasn’t perfect. That would be failure. But something that turns out halfway decent, given the time constraints, well, that’s not so bad. And you can take this strategy a step further by procrastinating, thereby ensuring that you will have limited time to complete the task. Genius.

Between deciding certain things don’t matter and procrastinating on the things that do matter until I just barely get them done, I can almost get by without having to beat myself up in my head. Almost.

But it has recently come to my attention that this is not how I want to live the rest of my life. The combination of avoiding certain things altogether because it might not be possible to do them flawlessly and the procrastination-freak-out-panic cycle is possibly not the healthiest. And it is certainly not the example I want to model for my kids.

What brought this to my attention? Well, the procrastination-induced sobbing fits and never-being-good-enough self-loathing aside, it was really when I saw Siena crumple her drawing and hurl it to the floor in tears because she had written one letter wrong as I helped her spell something. She stormed into her room and threw herself on the bed in tears.

“I’m never writing or doing that stupid drawing AGAIN!”

Umm.

Kind of like how I swear I’m never taking on another project like this AGAIN, every time I have any kind of deadline? Kind of like how I thought even a part-time job was incompatible with parenthood, because my performance was not up to my mental standard in either? Kind of like how I never think I should apply for a job if I have not done that exact thing (successfully) before, because the WORST THING EVER would be to get the job and not be AMAZING at it?

Yeah.

Time for both of us to make some changes.

I mentioned yesterday that I had a Trader Joe’s story to share. It’s not really about Trader Joe’s, but it took place there. It could’ve happened anywhere, but the fact that we were at Trader Joe’s at 5:30 p.m. on a Tuesday night made the whole scene that much more hilarious.

Why? Because the St. Louis Park Trader Joe’s, what with its close proximity to Uptown, at 5:30 on a weeknight, is pretty much jam-packed with Uptown hipsters stocking up on cheap organic dinner ingredients and cheap wine. You see jeans so trendy you didn’t even know that was a trend yet, save for the number of people in the store wearing similar ones. You see young couples holding hands as they decide on the right appetizers to serve their friends who are coming over for a drink later, before they all go out to the bars at 10:00 p.m. You see, as you’re pushing your shopping cart full of chatter-y kids and granola, lots of people who make you feel old and uncool.

Which is fine, right up until the kids start singing.

And what are they singing? Their favorite song, of course: “Battlefield,” by Jordin Sparks. Yes, Jordin Sparks of American Idol fame. And yes, they first heard this song when you played them a clip from So You Think You Can Dance, because you thought they would enjoy the part where the guy jumps and the girl rolls under him. And you were right — they did enjoy this, so much that they asked to watch the video nine billion more times. Not only do they like the dance, they are also in love with the catchy music.

(This is how an obsession is born.)

Every time we’re in the car now, Elliot will request “Battlefield.” He doesn’t understand that the radio is not an iPod, and that we can’t just play it for him on command. (We have not gone so far as to download the song, nor have we told them that this is an option.) Siena understands how the radio works, so she simply requests that we try to find the song. Which means we drive around listening to a lot of cheesy pop music while waiting for it to come on.

We had heard it in the car right before we got to Trader Joe’s that night (Siena made us wait in the car until the end of the song before going in) so it was fresh in their minds. So naturally, they both started belting it out like they were singing for their lives in front of Simon Cowell. I mean belting it. Full volume, full intensity.

The looks we got from other shoppers who wouldn’t be caught dead listening to this stuff were priceless. May their children some day embarrass them by singing a song not recorded by a hip new indie band so obscure no one has heard of them yet. May they sing it loudly. And with feeling. In public.

Well, not so much “adventures” as “things I have thought about today, mainly food-related.” But I felt the need to post an update after the sad tale of Siena’s first bus ride to camp.

And the update is that all is well, from what I gather. She comes home tired but rebounds nicely after dinner. Right now she is happily playing with Elliot and singing “9-1-1, Shorty fire burnin’ on the dance floor, whoa-oh” in a voice that sounds way more like Sean Kingston than you might expect from a five-year-old girl.

And she has plenty of fun things to tell us about: “shooting bows and arrows,” the giant slide, swimming, “the rock climbing where you go like this” (elaborate horizontal body contortions indicate that she is referring to bouldering), and at least one kid in her group whose name she can remember, a girl named Amelia. (Amelia, wherever you are, you have my undying gratitude for being nice enough that Siena remembered your name. She didn’t even remember the counselor’s name.)

So camp is going well, and I am feeling foolish for worrying that it wouldn’t. I just can’t shake the image of her hesitating in the middle of the bus, looking for a seat and ending up all by herself. It kills me. ***Sentimental Parenting Cliché Alert*** It kills me that I can’t go everywhere with her for the rest of her life and smooth out every possible bump in her path, making sure she is happy and comfortable at every moment. But even if there were any way of doing anything even remotely close to that, Siena, of course, wouldn’t want me to. She would kill me. She is tougher than I give her credit for, and way more independent than I ever expect of the baby I used to nurse five times a night, who never wanted to be out of my sight.

Other recent adventures/thoughts include pesto, lots and lots of pesto, and that comfy Ma Ingalls feeling I get from making something seasonal and storing it away for the long winter. (Like you can’t get fresh basil in December in the year 2009, and like freezing some pesto is in any way akin to the endless canning and preserving that went on in olden times, I know. [Eyes rolling at myself.] I still like it.

I also found a white skirt for Siena at Target for a whopping $3.49, and this is significant because 1) Elliot was mad that I wouldn’t buy him one, too and 2) Siena had asked this very morning if, instead of a plain white T-shirt to tie-dye at camp, she could have a skirt instead. And I had doubted that I could find a white skirt anywhere, much less a cheap clearance one, much less a cheap clearance one with shorts attached, making it playground-appropriate. Sometimes Target just really comes through for me. AS THEY SHOULD — I GO THERE ONCE A WEEK, EVEN IN WEEKS WHEN I ALSO GO TO TWO OTHER GROCERY STORES. Target, I can’t quit you.

Speaking of grocery stores, I have a Trader Joe’s story — for another post. It amused me, but this is getting long enough. So in place of a conclusion, I offer you this photo of some sweet corn and a bowl of melted butter:

Sweet corn and pesto. Summer, how I love you. And Camp, thanks for not destroying Siena’s enthusiasm for life. That’ll come later, like when she gets her first job.

You can pack a healthy lunch and the required two snacks. You can fill the water bottle with ice-cold water. You can sit at the kitchen table after bedtime, writing her name on the tags of swimsuits, towels, hoodies, and rain gear with a fine-tip permanent marker. You can pack everything carefully into the adorable Paris-themed backpack she got for her birthday, zipping it closed and tucking the bus form into an outside pocket where it will be handy when needed.

You can remain patient and supportive while a dramatic shoe crisis threatens to make everyone late (”But they’re too LOOSE! Make them TIGHTER! Forget it, I’m NOT GOING!”), finally suggesting two pairs of socks to make the shoes feel tight enough. (Plenty of other 80’s trends are coming back now — why not that one?)

You can zip through every yellow light as you rush to get to the bus stop well before the bus pulls up.

At the bus stop, you can smile encouragingly as she looks at you before approaching another little girl: “Do you want to be my friend?”

You can make small talk with the other parents and grandparents of waiting kids. You can hug her tightly and give her a kiss as the bus pulls up, and again right before she gets on it.

But when she’s on the bus, standing uncertainly in the middle of the aisle before finally ending up in a seat by herself, you can’t do anything but bite your lip and try not to cry as you watch the bus pull away.

And as you drive home with the two-year-old cheerfully yammering in the back seat, you can’t do anything but hope that she makes friends, that she has fun, and that she isn’t sitting alone when the bus pulls up to drop her off this afternoon.

…..

If the first day of camp is this hard, how will I survive sending her to kindergarten in a few weeks?